Babblings of interest — to me, that is

So much for the first of the year.

I’m on the fence about teachers. I’m just not interested in yoking myself to that at this point, and am not in the mood to have to pledge myself to an apprenticeship or get on the freeway for an hour and a half on weeknights to Prove My Dedication or any of that. I’m really leery right now and may be perfectly content for the moment to work assiduously out of the Sylvia Woods books, and only then consider Skyping with someone. There’s a Canadian fellow who is well known for his YouTube videos on harp technique and who does Skype lessons, and my cousin is working with a teacher on the East Coast who may (or may not, I haven’t investigated) give Skype lessons.

For now, we’ll see how it goes. This is unknown territory for me.

You know, I remember an interview that Zoe Keating gave some time ago where she described leaving an unsuccessful audition completely disenchanted with the whole culture of classical music, standing in cold fog and waiting for a bus while thinking to herself, “I will never play classical music again.” I’m not sure where I lie on that spectrum, but after months of crap and neverending back-and-forth, it’s at least somewhere along there.

And I’m not interested in hearing about how I Can Help Classical Music, or I Should Stand Up For Women Composers or some such. That’s dreck. This is not a problem with women. We’re not at fault, so I’m not holding myself responsible for the entirety of the solution anymore, nor guilting the shit out myself for not being able to solve a problem by my little lonesome that’s the size of seven billion people and has been around since the dawn of time — that’s just one more vicious edge on the sword I’ve been contemplating falling onto for the past few months. I am more than a body to be shoved in front of a cannon in hopes that once enough corpses pile up, whoever comes next can climb over the pile and make progress. I will not be a nameless corpse nor a nameless guilt-riddled corpse.

There comes a time when I Should Stay And Fight starts to sound a lot like But He Needs Me And I Can Help Him Change.

Anyhow. Looking forward to getting this thing. And once again, we’ll go from there.